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243 passages from Born to Run, by and about the people in it. Each one was checked word for word against the book’s text. Type to search, or pick a character.
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“For now, Caballo was content to just sit alone under a tree, smiling and sipping a beer, watching his dream play out before his eyes.”
“There was something terribly sad, yet terribly uplifting, about watching this prophet of the ancient art of distance running turning his back on everything except his dream, and heading back down to “the best place in the world to run.” Alone.”
“One of the first and most important lessons he learned from the Tarahumara was the ability to break into a run anytime, the way a wolf would if it suddenly sniffed a hare.”
“Everything Micah couldn’t carry on his back was discarded. The phone was disconnected, the apartment abandoned. Home became a ’69 Chevy pickup. By night, he slept in a sleeping bag in the back. By day, he hired himself out to mow lawns and move furniture. Every hour in between, he ran.”
“Mike Hickman disappeared. In his place arose Micah True, a name inspired by “the courageous and fearless spirit” of the Old Testament prophet Micah and the loyalty of an old mutt called True Dog.”
“As nonchalant as he acted about the risks, Caballo was leading an extremely dangerous life.”
“Lesson two,” Caballo called. “Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad.”
“Then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don’t give a shit how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go.”
“When you’ve practiced that so long that you forget you’re practicing, you work on making it smooooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one—you get those three, and you’ll be fast.”
“I don’t want anyone to do anything except come run, party, dance, eat, and hang with us. Running isn’t about making people buy stuff. Running should be free, man.”
“Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn’t. No one ever told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home. You live up to your own expectations, man.”
“Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked,” Caballo said.
“Tomorrow will be one of the greatest races of all time, and you know who’s going to see it? Only crazy people. Only you Mas Locos.”
“Tomorrow, you’ll see what crazy people see. The gun fires at daybreak, because we’ve got a lot of running to do.”
“We were born to run; we were born because we run. We’re all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.”
“We run when we’re scared, we run when we’re ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time. And when things look worst, we run the most.”
“That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation.”
“Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.”
“Perhaps all our troubles—all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can’t overcome—began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.”
“In the Tarahumara tongue, humans come in only two forms: there are Rarámuri, who run from trouble, and chabochis, who cause it.”
“Korima sounds like karma and functions the same way, except in the here and now. It’s your obligation to share whatever you can spare, instantly and with no expectations: once the gift leaves your hand, it was never yours to begin with.”
“Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble.”
“If you don’t have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.”
“Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life; we’ve taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure.”
“Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy—but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault.”
“Running seemed to be the fitness version of drunk driving: you could get away with it for a while, you might even have some fun, but catastrophe was waiting right around the corner.”
“The heroes of the past are untouchable, protected forever by the fortress door of time—unless some mysterious stranger magically turns up with a key.”
“Ultrarunners had no reason to cheat, because they had nothing to gain: no fame, no wealth, no medals. No one knew who they were, or cared who won their strange rambles through the woods.”
“It’s a natural law (or supernatural, if you’re so inclined) that weird things appear where people tend to disappear.”
“We wouldn’t be alive without love; we wouldn’t have survived without running; maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.”
“But you can’t muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it, like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.”
“Relax enough, and your body becomes so familiar with the cradle-rocking rhythm that you almost forget you’re moving.”
“Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet.”
“You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else.”
“Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day, then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom.”
“Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.”
“Nothing works out according to plan, but it always works out.”
“When it comes to mentors, you can’t beat survival.”
“To the Tarahumara, asking direct questions is a show of force, a demand for a possession inside their head.”
“I just don’t think I’m built for running fifty miles,” I said. “Everyone is built for running,” he said.
“There’s something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure.”
“It all began with a simple question that no one could answer. It was a five-word puzzle that led me to a photo of a very fast man in a very short skirt, and from there it only got stranger.”
“And like any other fine art, human distance running demands a brain-body connection that no other creature is capable of.”
“Likewise, the Hopis consider running a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a loved one, and in return ask the Great Spirit to match their strength with some of his own.”
“You don’t have to be fast. But you’d better be fearless.”
“The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other.”
“You can’t hate the Beast and expect to beat it; the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.”
“Vegetables, grains, and legumes contain all the amino acids necessary to build muscle from scratch.”
“During cross-country runs, Dusty and his buddies would pelt Scott with mud and take off. “He could never catch up,” Dusty said. “No one could understand why he was so slow, because Jerker trained harder than anyone.””
“Ultra god Scott Jurek summed up the Young Guns’ unofficial creed with a quote from William James he stuck on the end of every e-mail he sent: “Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.””
“Strictly by accident, Scott stumbled upon the most advanced weapon in the ultrarunner’s arsenal: instead of cringing from fatigue, you embrace it. You refuse to let it go.”
“Other runners try to disassociate from fatigue by blasting iPods or imagining the roar of the crowd in Olympic Stadium, but Scott had a simpler method: it’s easy to get outside yourself when you’re thinking about someone else.”
“He seemed to be a pure racing animal, which explained two of his other peculiar habits: at the start of every race, he’d let out a bloodcurdling shriek, and after he won, he’d roll in the dirt like a hyperactive hound.”
“We harassed the crap out of him,” said Dusty Olson, Proctor’s star jock when he and Scott were teenagers.
“For inspiration,” the article noted, “he repeats a saying of the Tarahumara Indians: ‘When you run on the earth and run with the earth, you can run forever.’ ”
“But if Scott was as good as he thought he was—if he was as good as he dared to be—then he’d run like no one ever had. Scott wasn’t settling for best in the world; he was out to be the best of all time.”
“You were amazing,” Scott said. “Yeah,” I said. “Amazingly slow.” It had taken me over twelve hours, meaning that Scott and Arnulfo could have run the course all over again and still beaten me. “That’s what I’m saying,” Scott insisted. “I’ve been there, man. I’ve been there a lot. It takes more guts than going fast.”
“Eric believes that’s one reason ultrarunners don’t get hurt and never seem to burn out: “They know how to train, not strain.””
“Imagine your kid is running into the street and you have to sprint after her in bare feet,” Eric told me when I picked up my training with him after my time with Ken. “You’ll automatically lock into perfect form—you’ll be up on your forefeet, with your back erect, head steady, arms high, elbows driving, and feet touching down quickly on the forefoot and kicking back toward your butt.”
“Get ready to go back in time,” Eric said. “You’re going tribal.”
“Look, I got some bad news,” he said. “You’re not going to win. No matter what you do, you’re going to be out there all day. So you might as well just relax, take your time, and enjoy it. Keep this in mind—if it feels like work, you’re working too hard.”
“Here’s the truth,” Eric said. “You’ve got zero margin of error. But you can do it.”
“Your body needs to be shocked to become resilient,” Eric explained. Follow the same daily routine, and your musculoskeletal system quickly figures out how to adapt and go on autopilot.
“Everyone thinks they know how to run, but it’s really as nuanced as any other activity,” Eric told me. “Ask most people and they’ll say, ‘People just run the way they run.’ That’s ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?”
“Before setting out for their sunset runs, Jenn and Billy would snap a tape of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” into their Walkman. When running stopped being as fun as surfing, they had agreed, they’d quit.”
“They were expected to accomplish nothing, so they could try anything. Audacity beckoned.”
“When I’m out on a long run,” she continued, “the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn’t going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow.”
“I never really discussed this with anyone because it sounds pretentious, but I started running ultras to become a better person,” Jenn told me. “I thought if you could run one hundred miles, you’d be in this Zen state. You’d be the fucking Buddha, bringing peace and a smile to the world. It didn’t work in my case—I’m the same old punk-ass as before—but there’s always that hope that it will turn you into the person you want…”
“Good morning,” Jenn said. “What happened to my eye?”
“He seemed to be the Bruce Wayne of barefoot running, the wealthy heir of a California amusement-park fortune who devoted himself to battling the worst crime ever committed against the human foot: the invention of the running shoe.”
“YOU’RE Caballo! THAT IS SO COOL! You can call me MONO! THE MONKEY! That’s ME, the MONKEY. That’s my spirit animal—”
“When I stepped through the door, I found Caballo staring in appalled disbelief at Barefoot Ted. As the rest of us had discovered during the long bus ride, Barefoot Ted talked the way Charlie Parker played the sax: he’d pick up on any cue and cut loose with a truly astonishing torrent of improvisation, seeming to breathe in through his nose while maintaining an endless flow of sound out of his mouth.”
“I felt a twinge of sympathy, but only a twinge. We’d been listening to The Mixed-Up Files of Barefoot Ted for the past fifteen hours. Now it was Caballo’s turn.”
“You didn’t even have to hear Barefoot Ted to appreciate his cocktail shaker of a mind; just seeing him was enough.”
“With his shaved head, cinder-block build, and dark eyes that danced around seeking attention as much as his voice, he looked like Uncle Fester in good fighting trim.”
“My life is a controlled explosion,” Barefoot Ted likes to say.
“He sputters around in a ’66 VW Beetle in such coughing decline, he can’t take it more than twenty-five miles from home. But that’s just fine by Ted; in fact, it’s all part of the master plan. “That way, I never have to travel very far,” he explains. “I’m a pauper by choice, and I find it extremely liberating.””
“Jenny Shimizu became a model and one of the planet’s best-known lesbians (“a homo household name,” as The Pink Paper declared) for her affairs with Madonna and Angelina Jolie (a career trajectory that, despite the tattoo on Jenny’s right biceps of a hot babe straddling a Snap-on tool, Ted never saw coming). As for Ted, well... He did manage to crack the Top 30 in the world for breathholding.”
“Silence fell over Creel, until the last thing Scott heard was Barefoot Ted’s voice in the dark. “Okay, brain,” Ted muttered. “Relax. Time to quiet down.””
“Dude, what are those things on your feet?” Jenn asked. “Vibram FiveFingers,” Ted said. “Aren’t they great? I’m their first sponsored athlete!”
“Yes, it was true; Ted had become America’s first professional barefoot runner of the modern era.”
“Even though Scott was in the Brooks trail shoe he’d helped design and Caballo was in sandals, they both skimmed their feet over the ground just the way Ted did in his bare feet, their foot strikes in perfect sync. It was like watching a team of Lipizzaner stallions circle the show ring.”
“Ted, where are your FiveFingers?” I asked. “Don’t need ’em,” he said. “I made a deal with Caballo that if I handled this hike, he wouldn’t get mad anymore if I went barefoot.”
“Humans didn’t invent rough surfaces, Oso,” Ted said. “We invented the smooth ones. Your foot is perfectly happy molding itself around rocks. All you’ve got to do is relax and let your foot flex. It’s like a foot massage.”
“Barefoot running really appealed to my artistic eye,” Ted was saying. “This concept of bricolage—that less is more, the best solution is the most elegant. Why add something if you’re born with everything you need?”
“You better add something to your feet when we cross the canyons,” Caballo said. “You brought some other shoes, right?” “Sure,” Ted said. “I’ve got my flip-flops.”
“Caballo smiled, waiting for Barefoot Ted to smile back and show he was joking. Barefoot Ted didn’t, and wasn’t. “You don’t have shoes?” Caballo said. “You’re going into the Barrancas in flip-flops?””
“Barefoot Ted was right, of course.”
“Lost in all the fireworks between Ted and Caballo was an important point: running shoes may be the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot.”
“Barefoot Ted, in his own weird way, was becoming the Neil Armstrong of twenty-first-century distance running, an ace test pilot whose small steps could have tremendous benefit for the rest of mankind.”
“In 2003, Ted decided to celebrate his fortieth birthday with his own endurance event, “The Anachronistic Ironman.” It would be a full Ironman triathlon—2.4-mile ocean swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile run—except, for reasons only clear to Ted, all the gear had to date from the 1890s.”
“If I make up my mind, I will find a way,” Ted says. “So I started doing research.”
“No wonder your feet are so sensitive,” Ted mused. “They’re self-correcting devices. Covering your feet with cushioned shoes is like turning off your smoke alarms.”
“They worked through the afternoon, trimming and measuring, until, just before dinner, Ted was able to do a test run down the street in his new pair of Air Lunas. From then on, he and Manuel Luna were inseparable.”
“Everyone got quiet. Barefoot Ted laid a hand on Manuel’s back. Of all the Tarahumara he could have asked for help with his huaraches, I realized, he hadn’t picked Manuel Luna by accident.”
“Hey, Bear,” the shopkeeper continued. “Do you know that Arnulfo has never been beaten? Do you know he’s won the one-hundred-kilometer race three times in a row?”
“Arnulfo wasn’t being rude with his silence; I was being creepy with my questions.”
“Caballo thought it over. For about a minute. “No, thanks,” he decided.”
“After a few years in the canyons, Caballo was stronger, healthier, and faster than he’d ever been in his life.”
“Some said Caballo Blanco was a fugitive; others heard he was a boxer who’d run off to punish himself after beating a man to death in the ring.”
“He was a fighter who went loco. A man died, and he went loco. He can kill you with his hands.”
“And there, it’s said, he was adopted by the Tarahumara as a friend and kindred spirit; a ghost among ghosts.”
“The White Horse looked and dressed and sounded nothing like the Tarahumara, but in a deeper way, he was one of them.”
“A while back, Caballo had decided on a spirit animal for me; while he was a sleek white horse, I was Oso—the lumbering bear.”
“From what Angel had picked up over the years, Caballo lived in a hut he’d built himself somewhere across the Batopilas mountain.”
“There are Raramuri who don’t respect our traditions as much as Caballo Blanco,” Angel lamented. “El Caballo sabe—the Horse gets it.”
“For days, I’d been searching Mexico’s Sierra Madre for the phantom known as Caballo Blanco—the White Horse.”
“Angel asked. “What’s your name?” “Caballo Blanco,” he said. The White Horse. “Pues, bueno,” the teacher said, shrugging.”
“The Tarahumara made him welcome in their own wordless way: they barely spoke to him, but when Caballo awoke every morning, he found a little pile of handmade tortillas and fresh pinole by his campsite.”
“His name was Micah True, he said, and he came from Colorado. Well, California actually.”
“See!” Caballo insisted. “He has a Raramuri soul.”
“Don’t fight the trail,” Caballo called back over his shoulder. “Take what it gives you.”
“The Raramuri have no money, but nobody is poor,” Caballo said. “In the States, you ask for a glass of water and they take you to a homeless shelter.”
“If I get hurt, lost, or die,” Caballo began. “If I get hurt, lost, or die,” we chanted. “It’s my own damn fault.”
“Yeah, I conned him into it,” Dusty said. Scott had never run half that distance but revered Dusty too much to say no.
“When he was in grade school, his mother contracted multiple sclerosis. It was up to Scott, as the oldest of three kids, to nurse his mother after school, clean the house, and haul logs for the woodstove while his father was at work.”
“After his mother had to be moved to a nursing home, Scott found himself alone with empty afternoons and a troubled heart. Luckily, just when Scott needed a friend, Dusty needed a sidekick.”
“Scott was a hero for a very different reason among back-of-the-packers too slow to see him in action.”
“The Tarahumara drew strength from this tradition, I realized, but Scott drew strength from every running tradition.”
“Caballo had to be high out of his skull if he thought Scott Jurek was coming down here to race a bunch of nobodies in the middle of nowhere.”
“Scott Jurek? Seven-time Western States champ and Ultrarunner of the Year Scott Jurek?”
“Even the Badwater race director, Chris Kostman, knew Scott was out of his element: “This race was thirty-five miles further than his longest previous race,” Kostman would comment.”
“Scott Jurek was a business enterprise that lived and died by the health of Scott Jurek—which meant the last thing the company’s chief asset needed to do was risk getting sick, shot, or defeated in some half-assed pickup race in a sniper-patrolled corner of the Mexican outback.”
“This had never happened to him before—but he knew what to do about it. Scott walked up to Arnulfo and bowed. The crowd went crazy.”
“Scott had been so focused that year on sharpening his trail skills for Western States, he hadn’t run more than ten miles at a time on asphalt.”
“But by the time he’d sealed his seventh Western States victory in 2005, he knew where to start looking.”
“Scott and Leah immediately vanished into the deep woods to celebrate in solitude. Scott could give a crap about talk shows; he didn’t even own a TV.”
“As a corporate-sponsored elite athlete, Scott had the worldwide buffet of nutrition at his fingertips, but after experimenting with the entire spectrum—everything from deer meat to Happy Meals to organic raw-food bars—he’d ended up with a diet a lot like the Tarahumara.”
“You don’t use goos?” Eric asked. “I like real food,” Scott said. “It’s just as portable and you get real calories, not just a fast burn.”
“I thought you were really good buddies,” Scott said. “Buddies? Not even close,” I said.
“Beside them was Eric Orton, an adventure-sports coach from Wyoming and longtime student of the Tarahumara who’d made me his personal disaster reconstruction project; over the past nine months, we’d been in weekly contact, sometimes daily, as Eric attempted to transform me from a splintery wreck into an unbreakable ultramarathon man.”
“Lunges, pushups, jump squats, crunches; Eric had me powering through a half hour of raw strength drills every other day, with nearly all of them on a fitness ball to sharpen my balance and fire those supportive ancillary muscles…”
“I snapped on a light, and saw Eric Orton, the adventure-sports coach, standing in the doorway.”
“The hills were so tough, Eric admitted, that he’d been on the verge of dropping out himself.”
“As an adventure-sports coach in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the former fitness director for the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Eric’s specialty is tearing endurance sports down to their integral movements and finding transferable skills.”
“You’re like everyone else,” Eric Orton told me. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Can’t hurt to carry the max when you go off-road,” Eric said. “Even if you don’t need it, it’s training for when you do.”
“There’s no sleepwalking your way up a hill,” Eric pointed out.
“Maybe,” Eric said. “Or maybe the race already started.”
“HEY!!!” everyone shouted when Jenn poked her head in. “HEY YA!” Jenn shouted back, and boogied in to get herself a drink.
“Jenn?” I asked. “Right on!” Jenn was wearing flip-flops, surf shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt.
“When Jenn arrived, they snapped to attention. “Hasta luego, Brujita,” they called. Jenn blew them screen-siren kisses with a big sweep of her arm, then climbed aboard.”
“JENN AND BILLY met in the summer of 2002, after Billy had finished his freshman year at Virginia Commonwealth University and returned home to lifeguard on Virginia Beach.”
“They’d gone to a Tex-Mex place, and while everyone else was eating, Jenn and Billy had had a drinking contest with fishbowl-sized margaritas.”
“During quieter moments, Jenn and Billy talked big waves and books. Jenn revered the Beat poets so much, she was planning to study creative writing at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics if she ever dropped back into college and got a degree first.”
“Whatever Billy was lacking in pep, Jenn made up for; during the ride back to the hotel, she did backflips over the seats until the driver slammed on the brakes and threatened to throw her out if she didn’t sit the hell down.”
“By 10:30 that night, Jenn and Billy had passed every other runner in the woods except one. Jenn didn’t just finish; she was the second runner overall and the fastest woman to ever run the course, breaking the old record by three hours (to this day, her 17:34 record still stands).”
“Ultrarunning, like rap music, was split by geography; as East Coast playas, Jenn and Billy had done most of their racing close to home and hadn’t yet crossed paths (or swords) with many of the West Coast elites.”
“I hate to say it, but Jenn is going to blow up,” Luis told Billy as they watched Jenn dart ahead for the third time.
“Luis and Barefoot Ted smothered Jenn in a tackle, then wrestled her into an elevator. Jenn kept wriggling, trying to break free while Scott and Eric were dragging Billy aboard.”
“When I got to the lobby, I found Jenn in her bra and shorts. She gave me a delighted smile, as if to say, “What a coincidence!””
“Only Scott, Arnulfo, and Silvino were still ahead of her, and she was nibbling steadily at their lead.”
“As they walked, Jenn flashed back to the way she’d scoffed at her mother the night before she and Billy had left for El Paso. “Jenn,” her mother had implored. “You don’t know these people.””
“Jenn and Billy peered, then shot toward him like hounds off the leash.”
“Billy wore surf baggies and no shirt, while Jenn had on black compression shorts and a black jog bra, her hair knotted in two tight Pippi braids.”
“Whatever,” Jenn said with a shrug. “Truth in advertising.”
“Dude, that’s totally it,” Jenn said. “I’m in.”
“So!” Jenn blurted. “What are you guys up for tonight? I promised Billy some big-ass margaritas.”
“Hooo mama!” Jenn said. “Who’s the troublemaker now, Ted?”
“My Little Pony,” Jenn smirked. “You kinda look like Caballo.”
“Dude, what are those things on your feet?” Jenn asked.
“Billy shared Jenn’s raw good looks and beach-bum wardrobe.”
“Billy wore surf baggies and no shirt, while Jenn had on black compression shorts and a black jog bra, her hair knotted in two tight Pippi braids.”
“Jenn and Billy had only started running two years before, but Billy was already winning some of the toughest 50Ks on the East Coast, while “the young and beautiful Jenn Shelton,” as the ultrarace blogger…”
“At some point, Billy wandered off in search of a bathroom and never returned.”
“JENN AND BILLY met in the summer of 2002, after Billy had finished his freshman year at Virginia Commonwealth University and returned home to lifeguard on Virginia Beach.”
“Fine!” Billy erupted. “It’s yours.” “Sweet!” “If,” Billy continued, “you run down the beach, bare-ass.”
“I’ve never seen a place like this,” Billy said. “Caballo’s got the right idea.”
“Dude, you are so on. Right after work.” Billy shook his head. “Nope. Right now.”
“It’s not him,” Billy protested. “It’s this place.”
“Sandwiching Scott were Luis Escobar and his father, Joe Ramirez.”
“Sorry, something came up,” Scott told Luis. When Luis heard what it was, his heart skipped a beat.
“No one had ever gotten photos of Tarahumara runners in full flight on their home turf, and for good reason: the Tarahumara run for fun, and having white devils around wasn’t any fun.”
“He’s back at the hotel bar with Luis Escobar.” “Scott drinks?” “Looks that way.”
“Got it!” Luis said, dropping back to show me the image in his digital camera. He’d sprinted ahead and wheeled around just in time to capture everything I’d come to understand about running over the past two years.
“I’ll run back for them,” Luis offered. “No,” Caballo said. “They could still be in bed.”
“I hate to say it, but Jenn is going to blow up,” Luis told Billy as they watched Jenn dart ahead for the third time.
“He’s brainwashed you already!” Luis hooted. “The Cult of the White Horse.”
“He left a message that he’d be getting here later,” Luis said. “I guess that’s everyone, then.
“How about that barefoot guy?” I asked. “Is he still coming?” A few months before, someone who called himself “Barefoot Ted” began blitzing Caballo with a torrent of messages.
“Barefoot Ted believed we could abolish foot injuries by throwing away our Nikes, and he was willing to prove it on himself: he ran the Los Angeles and Santa Clarita marathons in his bare feet and finished fast enough to qualify for the elite Boston Marathon.”
“He was rumored to train by running barefoot in the San Gabriel Mountains, and by pulling his wife and daughter through the streets of Burbank in a rickshaw.”
“Now, he was coming to Mexico to commune with the Tarahumara and explore whether the key to their amazing resilience was their nearly bare feet.”
“CABALLO BLANCO! That’s YOU, RIGHT?” Before I could make my way off the bus in Creel, I could hear a voice outside booming away like a siege gun.
“In our first thirty seconds in Creel, Caballo got blasted with more conversation than he’d heard in a year.”
“The first time I read that the Tarahumara could run a one-hundred-mile race in sandals, that realization was so shocking and SUBVERSIVE, so counterintuitive to what I had assumed was NECESSARY for a human being to go that distance, I remember thinking What in the HELL? How in the HELL is this possible?”
“His outfit was a combination of Tibetan Warrior Monk and skateboard chic: denim kickboxing pants with a drawstring waist, a skintight white tank top, Japanese bathhouse slippers, a brass skeleton amulet dangling to the middle of his chest, and a red bandanna knotted around his neck.”
“We were all starving and exhausted after the long trip, shivering in the high-mesa cold and longing for nothing except a warm bed and a hot bowl of Mama’s frijoles—all of us except Ted, that is, who believed the first order of business was continuing the life story he’d begun telling Caballo the second they met.”
“Caballo’s teeth were on edge, but he decided not to interrupt. He had some terrible news, and he hadn’t figured out yet how to break it without all of us turning around and getting right back on the bus.”
“He lives in Burbank, in a small compound that resembles Tom Hanks’s kid-gone-wild apartment in Big.”
“I forget that heavy Heidegger word, but it’s the one that means I’m an expression of this place,” Ted says, although the place isn’t his at all. It belongs to his cousin Dan, a self-taught mechanical genius who single-handedly created the world’s leading carousel-restoration business.
“You have to feel a pang of sympathy for the poor guy, burbling away with dreams of glory at the bottom of his cousin’s swimming pool, while just about everyone he knew was painting masterpieces, bedding superstars, and getting close-ups from Bernardo Bertolucci.”
“But Chase Chen got it. His artist’s eye also spotted the quiet intensity in the aftermaths of Hurricane Ted. Chase’s specialty, after all, was “the dramatic dance between sunlight and shadow,” and brother, was dramatic dancing ever Ted to a tee.”
“He could see the same thing during Ted’s quiet moments, the same simmering power and unlimited possibility, and that’s when Chase reached for his sketch pad. For years, Chase would use Ted as a model; some of his finest works, in fact, are portraits of Ted, Lisa, and their incandescently lovely daughter, Ona.”
“In the midst of this banter, Scott was busy watching Barefoot Ted. The trail was snaking through a rock field, but even though we had to hop from boulder to boulder, Ted wasn’t slowing down a bit.”
“It’s a pretty wild story—,” I began, but by then we’d reached Scott and the others, who were listening to Barefoot Ted hold court. “Tell you later,” I promised Caballo. Barefoot Ted had slipped off his FiveFingers and was demonstrating the perfect shoeless foot strike.
“Every time I ran for an hour, I had excruciating lower-back pain,” Ted says. “It was so discouraging. I couldn’t even imagine being able to run a marathon.”
“For millions of years, humans ran without arch support, pronation control, or gel-filled pods under their heels. How the hell they managed, Ted had no idea.”
“Caballo slid through a gap in the retaining wall and began picking his way over the boulders to the edge of the river. Barefoot Ted pushed ahead to join him, showing off how nimbly he could hop from rock to rock in his bare feet. If Caballo was impressed, he wasn’t showing it.”
“MANUEL!” Barefoot Ted shouted from across the street. Manuel’s head jerked up. “Amigo, am I glad to see you,” Barefoot Ted said.
“He’d been looking around for some tire rubber so he could make his own pair of Tarahumara sandals, but figured he needed some expert advice. He grabbed mystified Manuel by the arm and led him into a tiny shop.”
“Minutes later, Barefoot Ted and Manuel Luna were outside with their heads together, tracing Ted’s feet and slicing away at the tire tread with my big-bladed Victorinox knife.”
“But it wasn’t Ted telling stories this time. It was Caballo. Barefoot Ted pulled me back into Mama Tita’s garden, where Caballo was holding Scott and Billy and a few of the others spellbound.”
“Did you say Arnulfo is coming?” “Yeah,” Caballo nodded. He had to be joking. Arnulfo? He wouldn’t even talk to me, let alone join me for a run.
“Three years in a row, Arnulfo had hiked for days to show up in Guachochi for a sixty-mile race through the canyons.”
“Three years in a row, Arnulfo won. He took the title from his brother, Pedro, and was followed in second and third by a cousin, Avelado, and his brother-in-law, Silvino.”
“While searching for a guide, I’d learned that Arnulfo Quimare was the greatest living Tarahumara runner, and he came from a clan of cousins, brothers, in-laws, and nephews who were nearly as good.”
“Then Arnulfo Quimare, the most feared of Tarahumara runners, stepped outside.”
“I tried not to stare, but it’s hard to keep your eyes off a guy as good-looking as Arnulfo. He was brown as polished leather with whimsical dark eyes that glinted with bemused self-confidence from under the bangs of his black bowl-cut.”
“Would you ever race in the United States?” I asked Arnulfo. He continued to chomp limes and spit seeds.
“We can go see Arnulfo Quimare. . . .” If he’d stopped right there, I’d have been ecstatic.
“Another Tarahumara man was napping in the shade of the back wall, but there was no sign of Arnulfo.”
“It was eerie watching Scott run side by side with Arnulfo; even though Scott had never seen the Tarahumara before and Arnulfo had never seen the outside world, somehow these two men separated by two thousand years of culture had developed the same running style.”
“Arnulfo was walking right behind Scott, watching him intently.”
“Scott walked up to Arnulfo and bowed. The crowd went crazy.”
“Arnulfo won a one-hundred-kilometer race in the canyons three times. But the Deer has won a one-hundred-mile race in the mountains seven times.”
“The crowd had already swallowed Arnulfo by the time Scott crossed the line in second.”
“El Venado,” he said, which even got a reaction out of too-cool Arnulfo. Now, what was the crazy gringo playing at?
“Arnulfo heard and glanced over. His lips twitched in a slight smile when he recognized me.”
“That body behind the hut was his big brother, Pedro, who was too conked out with fever to even get up. Still, Arnulfo invited us to rest.”
“Just as unbelievably, his cousin Silvino was right beside him.”
“Right here. This is where the Quimare clan lives.”
“The guy I want is Arnulfo Quimare.”
“It’s like getting Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle in the same shot.” If Arnulfo had an advantage, it wouldn’t be style or spirit.
“Arnulfo still had the lead. Silvino was in second, but Scott was closing fast. With a mile to go, Scott ran Silvino down.”
“The prospect of heading right to the hidden huts of the Quimare dynasty was better than I could have hoped for.”
“As we chomped and spat seeds in the dirt, Arnulfo stared off silently at the water. Every once in a while, he turned and gave me an appraising look.”
“We’re all one.” Arnulfo was looking at me. “Kuira-ba,” I repeated. “Kuira,” Arnulfo breathed, his voice as soft as a sigh.
“Marcelino’s father, Manuel Luna, could beat just about anyone at an all-night rarájipari, the grown-ups’ version of the game I was watching.”
“Even a superstar like Manuel Luna couldn’t win without a village behind him.”
“Manuel Luna caught up and locked in beside them, the three elders leading the younger Tarahumara like a wolf pack on the hunt.”
“Manuel Luna, whose new sandals had fallen apart at mile 83 and left his unprotected feet raw and bleeding, still surged back over the rocky trail around Turquoise Lake to finish fifth.”
“Of all the Tarahumara he could have asked for help with his huaraches, I realized, he hadn’t picked Manuel Luna by accident.”
“Manuel Luna didn’t return the smile, but he sandwiched both Caballo’s hands with his own.”
“Even while mourning his magnificent son, Manuel had to be wondering which of his children would be next.”
“Manuel Luna’s genial smile disappeared and his face hardened into oak.”
“I’m pretty sure Manuel Luna will come,” Caballo continued. “Maybe with his son.”
“What Ted wanted, Manuel demonstrated with his hands, was a strip with a groove right down the middle, so the knot for the toe strap can be countersunk and not get torn off by the ground.”
“Caballo was overcome with emotion. I thought it was just relief, until he reached out with both hands toward a Tarahumara runner with a mournful, Geronimo-like face. “Manuel,” Caballo said.”
“Just the chance to run alongside Manuel and Marcelino and Caballo again would be worth it. The way Caballo and Marcelino ran, it was the closest a human could come to flying.”
“But Manuel Luna had spent a year reflecting on gringo-style racing, and he’d done a nice job of briefing his new teammates.”
“From then on, he and Manuel Luna were inseparable.”
“He told me about you,” Manuel said. “He wanted to be here.” That emotional reunion between Caballo and Manuel broke the ice for everyone else.
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